Rapid damage assessment of 1/3 scaled-down two-story reinforced concrete school building models

ABSTRACT This study presents a damage assessment scheme for seismically excited torsion-coupled nonlinear buildings based on the normalized relative displacement vibration shape (NRDVS). In order to investigate the applicability of the proposed NRDVS, the relative displacements are obtained from a real-time structural response integrator (RTSRI) by integrating the relative accelerations simulated from multiple-degree-of-freedom nonlinear models. As a result, the normalized inter-story drift ratio (NIDR) calculated by differencing the normalized displacements of the two successive floors of NRDVS and dividing by the story height can reveal the damaged floors as well as the location of damaged building members. Furthermore, the proposed damage assessment scheme is validated by observing the experimental measurements of shaking table tests of three 1/3 scaled-down two-story reinforced concrete school building models conducted at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), Taipei, Taiwan.